How Risk Works

The board is a world map. Six continents are divided into 42 territories (between four and 12 per continent). The board has numbers along its bottom edge, which indicate the number of armies that a player receives when he takes it over and trades in his cards.

The number of armies a player controls is denoted by different pieces. An infantry piece is worth a single army, while cavalry is worth five armies, and artillery symbolizes 10 armies.

Of the 56 Risk cards, 43 are marked with a territory and a picture of infantry, cavalry or artillery. Another two are wild cards, with all three Army pieces on them but no territory. The remaining 12 are secret mission cards, which are used only in a variation of the game called Secret Mission Risk. (We'll discuss Secret Mission later.)

The basic objective is to conquer as many territories and continents as possible, amass as many armies, and gradually eliminate all your opponents. The players start by rolling a die, after which the person with the highest number places an army on a territory of his or her choosing. The other player or players then claims a territory in similar fashion, and they go back and forth until all the territories are occupied and the armies are in place.

At the beginning of each player's turn, he or she is allotted additional armies, based upon the number of territories and continents under the player's control, as well as the sets of Risk cards that he or she cashes in. To get a card, you have to attack and successfully capture a territory.

On each turn, you have the option of either attacking a territory or passing and allowing the other person to take his or her turn. You can only attack territories that are adjacent to one of your own, or connected to it by a dotted line. (For example, North Africa may attack Egypt, and Greenland may attack Quebec or Iceland.) Also, you must have at least two armies on a territory to launch an attack from it. In attack, an army confronts a defending army, and the outcome of the confrontation is determined by which of the players gets the highest number from rolling the dice. The more armies you attack with, the more dice you get to roll, which increases your chances of victory [source: Hasbro].

Using Risk to Train for Real Life

Risk virtuoso Eshan Honary, author of "Total Diplomacy: The Art of Winning Risk," writes that Risk is more than just fun. The board game provides an effective simulation for would-be business moguls and politicians who want to master the nuances of complex human interaction. In that respect, he argues, Risk, which can include up to six players and incorporates probabilities, is superior even to chess, which is played between just two people and ignores the element of chance. But perhaps the most important benefit of playing Risk, he says, is that the game compels players to analyze and cope with their own psychological strengths and weaknesses. "Once a player recognizes that he is weak in a particular skill," Honary writes, "he can focus on that specific skill to improve his survival capability" [source: Honary].